


quiet mercy

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Drug Addiction, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family History, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Mentions of conversion therapy, Past Drug Use, Psychological Trauma, Repressed Memories, Secrets
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-18
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 21:19:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16026170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: Everybody in this town has secrets. Fred's spent his whole life burying his, putting them safely away under lock and key. Somewhere no one can ever find them, least of all himself.Of course, some of them had gotten out when they shouldn't have. Like the DUI. Or his inability to pace himself with the prescription they gave him after the shooting. But then there are those that run even deeper. The ones that can never,nevercome to light.Like how it wasn't his first time.And where he spent the summer of 91.





	1. hard to be a saint in the city

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bisexualfpjones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bisexualfpjones/gifts).



> _Everybody's got a secret, Son,_  
>  Something that they just can't face,  
> Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it,  
> They carry it with them every step that they take.   
>  [\-- Bruce Springsteen, Darkness On The Edge of Town](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg0ekQBmzKs)
> 
> happy early ass birf day briana im starting early so i can finish it by then.. and hopefully write you a lil something else too!!

He finds the journal wedged in the side of a box, its pages wavy with water damage and the faded green cover gone peat-coloured under the dust. The contents of this particular box are incredibly old and remarkably irrelevant - a bible camp trophy awarded to Oscar Andrews and a petrified rubber duck tell him as much - and FP would have tossed it aside entirely if not for the embossed gold letters on the front spelling out what it was:

DIARY. 

The five letters must have gleamed brightly once - with age their metallic shine has faded to a dull bronze, but as FP moves a thumb over the word some of it gives way so that gold peeks out as sunlight does through a dirty window. He flips it open, knowing he shouldn’t dare to hope, but is instantly rewarded beyond his wildest dreams - the entirety of the page is covered in Fred’s small, cramped, adolescent hand. 

Unaware of the grin on his face, he searches for a date in the top right corner. 1991. A holy grail, then - he and Fred had been sixteen that year, and already using the back of their van to fuck with the vigour and reliability of rabbits. Shifting forward on his knees to loosen the cramp in the back of his right thigh, he skims feverishly through the pages, searching for the start, or for any mention of his name. 

Fred was a packrat - had been his whole life, since they were fourteen and he used to hoard rocks in his pockets on camping trips. When his mom had packed up and moved West, leaving the old Andrews house vacant, it had been Fred who had insisted on rescuing mountains of his boxed-up childhood from the landfill and moving them down into the basement of his new home. Mary, bless her heart, had lived with the mess. (FP supposed it was a small price to pay for Fred Andrews as your spouse.) So they’d stayed there until this spring, when Fred had finally caved and admitted some of it could be whittled down. 

FP was helping him sort it, or at least he was peeking into boxes and calling it helping - his main job was telling Fred in an authoritarian voice every so often that no, he did not need to keep his dead brother’s seashell collection from a forgotten trip to the shore in 1979. He has a toss pile as high as his shoulder behind him, and every so often he catches Fred trying to sneak things out. It’s rare that he gets to be the voice of reason, and he’s actually enjoying it. 

FP glances over his shoulder, but Fred is still safely occupied at the far end of the room with his dad’s old baseball cards, which promises the potential of a week-long diversion. Grinning with pleasure, FP stops the pages of Fred’s journal with his finger and reads the first entry his eye lands on - one dated May 26, 1991. 

_ Had a good weekend. FP and I went up to the lake on Sat but the van broke down. He’s so cute when he’s frustrated, but he doesn’t know it. Of course we fixed it but we stayed up there anyways just to see the stars. I counted the freckles on his back while he was sleeping. 16. I’m so in love with him sometimes i think i might die.  _

That was it. FP’s conscious of his smile at last, the corners of his cheeks painful, his teeth dry. With effort, he tries to relax his cheek muscles, but only finds himself smiling harder, his throat too thick to swallow. In his wildest dreams, he couldn’t have hoped for something better. He reads it again, lingering on that last line, giving himself a superstitious pinch between his thumb and forefinger in case he was dreaming. He doesn’t wake up. Whatever their relationship had become, these words were in black and white, permanent. 

Fred had loved him once. 

He’s going to tease him about it - of course he’s going to tease him about it. But it means more than that, far more than ribbing material or the lucky excavation of something to embarrass an old friend with. He’s holding tangible proof that their relationship had never been one-sided - the total annihilation of his greatest insecurities.  It hadn’t all been in his head. He had, at one time in his long and agonizing life, been loved. 

This idiot really should have known better than to leave his journal lying around.

He turns the page, skips past a lengthy entry detailing Hermione’s plans to make herself prom queen and what looks like a play-by-play recap of one of their high school baseball games. Before he could reveal his discovery to Fred he wanted to find something juicy and awful - the kind of thing that would make his friend flush all the way down his neck when he read it out loud. At the bottom of the next page he finds it - a Friday night entry timestamped 11:44 PM. 

_ I don’t know if this is normal but I can get hard smelling FPs clothes. He keeps leaving shirts in my room and I keep jerking off to them. _

Shaking with quiet laughter, FP turns the page. That was good, but there had to be more, something even better. Disappointingly, he finds the dates drop off after the beginning of June. There seems to be a visible break in the entries - the cleanly written ones before June 2nd and the crowded, almost illegible ones that come afterward. He wonders if the journal had become lost for awhile, picked back up at a later point in time, but the entries are still dated the summer of 1991 - end of June, now, and beginning of July. In a month Fred had switched pens from blue to black, and his writing had become deeply slanted, as though he’d been constantly writing on a bed. FP tilts his head to the right to read it. 

_ I took a shower in the morning. Cold. Breakfast was eggs and toast. I ate the eggs. I read a book for about an hour. The Catcher In The Rye. I guess I like it.  _

Bored, FP abandons the entry and starts skimming for his name again, trying to recall what he and Fred had done that summer. A few familiar people crop up - Hermione, ugh, Bernice, Artie, Oscar, even Alice, - but finally he recognizes his name, easily discernible by the two uppercase initials. The entry is dated July 1st. 

_ I dreamed about FP last night. First time since school ended, even though I’m always thinking about him. Every time i dream about him sucking my cock I wake up so hard it hurts. I had to jerk off quiet so no one would hear.  _

FP feels that grin splitting his cheeks again. Folding the corner of the page down so he won’t lose it, he flips quickly through the rest of the journal, slowing down at another sighting of his name about halfway through. His brow furrows as he reads this one, the writing even more cramped on the page and riddled with spelling mistakes that shouldn’t be there. 

_ -driving me crazy that I had to lie to FP about what im doing. its like my mom and dad dont care. they cant wrap their heads around why i feel like this. why its shitty to betray your friends trust like that on purpose. i wouldnt mind if it was some kind of punishment for me. god knows i deserve it. but they think its whats best and thats whats fucked up i think. that im supposed to be doing this for my own sake.  _

Bewildered, FP reads it again but can glean no more understanding from it the second time. He rifles slowly backward through the journal, looking for an explanation, but finds the preceding entries vague and meaningless, riddled with the forms of bleak words like  _ shower _ and  _ sick.   _

He turns the page and one entry jumps out at him, written in stark, dark lines. 

I wish I was dead its so fucking cold here i wish id just **DIE**

FP’s blood runs cold, a chill soaking up his spine that has nothing to do with the damp basement. He’s not smiling anymore. Instead he can feel his jaw locking so tight it throbs. 

The pages are brittle with age, the imprint of the text on the opposite side pressing through into his fingers like scar tissue. He lets his eyes wander down the lines, skating over admission after admission of pure misery - 

_ Im trying to stay positive but it hurts. oh GOD everything hurts. _

_ i can do this. i can live through it. i can live through anything.  _

_ its what i have to do. its my own fault.  _

_ it hurts so much. i have no one here.  _

His eyes flicker back to the top of the page - that one word,  **DIE** \- and he has to make a conscious effort to loosen his jaw before it pops. This was not what he had ever expected from Fred’s boyhood diaries. Sure, his friend could get melodramatic - he remembers several occasions in their youth on which Fred had pledged to off himself in increasingly dramatic ways if Hermione didn’t return his hapless crush - but there’s a stark honesty to this writing that tells him Fred is not exaggerating. He flips back toward the safety of his earmarked page and the journal falls easily open to an entry with his name in it, as though the spine had been leaned on in that exact place. The water damage is worse here, but the words are still legible. 

_ It’s like you don’t realize how much someone is a part of you until you have to go without them, even for a little bit. When we went on vacation last year for a week and a half I started missing FP so much my chest ached.  _

FP can feel a lump in his throat. He swallows, but it doesn’t go away.  

_ I’ve been at the Sisters for two days and it’s like a whole different world. They let you call outside but I dont think I can talk longer than a minute without puking.  _

The Sisters? FP feels like he’s been knocked on the head. When the hell had Fred ever been at the Sisters? 

_ I can’t call him anyways because of the lie we came up with. It’s kind of fucked up hearing your parents lie for you. I told my first lie when i was five and my dad absolutely lost it on me. But I guess this is different. _

FP anxiously flips the page over.  _ I feel too sick to think anyway. I cant believe i thought i could do this alone.  _

He’s bending the pages, he realizes, scrambling through the notebook to get to the middle, but he needs to know, needs an answer, or even a clue. His eyes scan through packed lines, the words blurring into ink-blot shapes like beetle carcasses, and the only thing he can hear is his breath hitching in his throat, loud in the silence of the basement. 

“FP?” 

_ But you know whats the most fucked up of all?  _ The ink on the page blurs in his vision until he can’t read through the smear. _ I have to tell this lie for the rest of my life.  _

A rustle of denim and Fred - the real, flesh-and-blood Fred who’s spent the past hour on vintage baseball cards, sinks down to his knees beside him, as easy as crouching down at home plate. 

“What are you looking at?” 

His presence beside the potent adolescent voice of the journal makes FP jump like he’s been visited by a ghost. He slams the book closed, a spectral puff of dust rising from its crinkled pages, and each one of those five gold letters on the cover catches the brief basement light in turn. 

He sees the recognition happen. Fred’s mouth drops open, his eyes grow hard, and then the diary is being snatched from his hands, too fast to pull it back. Fred yanks it open, scans the first page to confirm his suspicions, and then snaps it shut again so that another cloud of ancient dust explodes into their faces. 

“This is private. You shouldn’t be reading this.” His voice shakes with barely-contained rage, blotted out by what FP recognizes easily as fear. “Why would you read this?!”

“When did you go to the Sisters?” 

“Never!” snaps Fred, but his face has gone pale as chalk, and FP realizes he has no way of knowing how much he had read and understood. “You weren’t supposed to - how could you -” 

He can barely get the words out. FP’s never seen Fred like this - breathless, trembling, each of his sentences trailing off into an asthmatic wheeze. His face has gone a blotchy pink, the way Artie used to look when he was about to yell. Fred brandishes the diary at him, his voice hoarse and sharp. 

“Forget you ever read this,” 

FP scoffs. “Bullshit I will.” He rises to his feet. “Why is this the first I’m hearing about this? How long were you there?! 

“Why does it matter?” 

“Why does it matter!? Why does it matter that you were in a convent and didn’t tell me!?” 

“Just drop it, FP.” 

“Bull _ shit _ I’ll drop it-!” 

They’re interrupted by the slamming of the kitchen door above them. Both of them freeze, poised comically still like children playing statue tag. Fred swallows so loudly that FP can hear it in the silence, before the unmistakable patter of Archie’s converse high-tops starts up on the ceiling above their heads. His young voice issues from a floor above. 

“I’m home!” 

Fred locks eyes with FP. In the long silence he only shakes his head, slowly, back and forth. FP purses his lips into a frown but keeps them shut. 

Archie calls again, confused. 

“Dad?” 

Fred, his face stark white, his eyes huge, manages in the most admirably normal voice FP’s ever heard him conjure up: “We’re down in the basement, Archie.” 

A footstep, two. A muscle is twitching in Fred’s jaw. “Do you need help?” Archie calls. 

Fred is frozen, his eyes stuck, unblinking, on FP’s face. “No, we’re okay.” 

Quiet, and then Archie’s feet clump behind them down the stairs. FP keeps his eyes on Fred. Fred doesn’t break his gaze, not even to turn around as his son comes into view. They stand a little apart from each other in the mess of unpacked boxes like cowboys at a standoff. Neither moves. 

Archie senses the tension in the air. Pauses. Fred still doesn’t turn around. 

“Are you guys okay?” Fred’s son frowns a little, furrows his brow in a way that’s adorably Fred-like. “What’s going on?” 

“We’re fine.” Fred’s mouth is moving, but his features don’t change. “Jughead’s dad was just going home.” 

“Actually,” interrupts FP in a heavy tone, “I thought I’d stay a bit longer. Help Fred sort through a few more boxes.” 

“No.” Fred’s voice is so laden with meaning that FP’s sure Archie won’t miss it. He slowly enunciates every word. “I  _ think _ Archie and I can handle it.” 

Archie shifts from foot to foot, privy to the tension in the air, but not the cause. “I mean, I have homework to do so-

“We’ll talk about it later,” says Fred inexplicably, his eyes boring holes into FP’s face, and FP’s about to ruin everything for him when he sees the plea in them, realizes the unprecedented cruelty it would take to drag this out in front of Fred’s own son, in his own home. Backs off a little, like a dog receiving a command.

“Okay.” 

“Later,” repeats Fred, the word a promise as much as a bargain, his eyes stern and brown and desperate, and FP lets him win, drops his eyes to the cement floor. 

“Your dad’s right,” he tells Archie, grinning though he’s never felt less like it in his life, and feels more than sees Fred deflate in relief. “I have to be getting home.”

“I’m going upstairs,” says Archie, rolling his eyes in an  _ adults are weird  _ way and does. 

Fred stays where he is, the diary still clutched in his hand. FP thinks briefly about snatching it back, but Fred’s knuckles are white with his grip, and FP doesn’t think he’d be able to free it from his fingers. 

“Just tell me why,” he says, moving closer to his friend, his voice low. His hipbone bumps Fred’s, a promise that he’ll walk by him and leave if he gets an answer. But Fred only stares at a point on the floor, his back and shoulders rigid as a board. He says nothing. 

FP sighs, inhaling a deep breath, the dust of the air and the smell of him, the lemon-scented cleaner Fred always uses down here. His voice is little more than breathing out, leaning close to Fred’s ear to make sure he can hear, letting some dominance leak into his voice. “Tell me why and we can do the rest later.” 

“Pills,” spits out Fred, his voice scratchy, like he’s getting over a cold. “Rehab.” 

FP slowly looks at him. 

“Please,” whispers Fred, pain flitting across his face. “Go.” 

He’s trembling and FP reaches for his wrist, gently, as comfort, but Fred whisks the hand holding the journal out of his reach, stepping away from FP with large, distrustful strides. FP swallows his anger and stows his hand in his pocket. 

“This isn’t over,” growls FP, and then stalks up the stairs two by two, using all of his self-control not to shove Fred into the wall or slam the basement door behind him. 


	2. stay hard, stay hungry, stay alive if you can

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I took month-long vacations in the stratosphere, and you know it's really hard to hold your breath  
> I swear I lost everything I ever loved or feared, I was the cosmic kid in full costume dress  
> Well, my feet they finally took root in the earth, but I got me a nice little place in the stars  
> And I swear I found the key to the universe in the engine of an old parked car.  
> [\--Bruce Springsteen, Growin' Up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3Cs-bZ2YX0)
> 
>  
> 
> I also wanna point out that [briana answered the ask that led to this fic and essentially wrote it herself...](http://fredsythe.tumblr.com/post/177749844923/tell-me-more-about-fp-finding-freds-journal) im just filling in a gap or two

Fred dreams of the place for the first time in twenty-seven years - not a nightmare, but the sense of moving down a long, inhospitable hallway, a visit to a memory scrubbed of all detail and meaning. He wakes into a murky cloud of nausea so heavy that he’s surprised when he doesn’t immediately vomit into his sheets. Curled on his side on top of his quilt, his legs drawn up halfway to the fetal position, he shuts his eyes tight and wills it to pass the way clouds pass over a field. 

The thick, cold feeling only rises and he steadies himself in a detached way to be sick onto his pillow, and then it abates enough that he can roll over and moan pitifully into his duvet. Rain - the same rain that had begun while he and FP had been wading through the storage room in the basement - drums hard and fast against the roof of the house. His head throbs, and something urgent and incessant begins to prickle at the back of his mind, something he’d rather not think about, at least until he can knock back two of his oxycodone with a glass of water. 

Those. Ha. He’d be waiting a long time for that. 

His bedroom door is shut, the curtains on the opposite wall drawn so that only the place where they do not touch - a thin, white, wedding ring of light - illuminates the room. Fred may have been asleep for hours or seconds. His fingers probe the smooth face of his dresser to figure out which one and come up empty handed: his watch is still on his wrist, a smooth pink diamond bitten into the skin there from where he’d pinned it under the weight of his body. The small hand is just past six, the long hand at one, meaning he’s been unconscious for two hours. 

Fred had collapsed onto his bed immediately after FP had left, abandoning the disorganized chaos of his basement for another day’s work. The reason  _ why _ is slowly seeping into his memory like light bleeding around a doorframe, and he furrows his brow as he focuses hard, patching the cracks in his mind as diligently as any repair he’d make on the job site. He can do without that memory for now. There was a finite amount of time before he had to face it, and he wanted to spend as much of it unconscious as possible. 

Still, what remains is the feeling of having done something impossibly bad - of being a little kid waiting for a phone call home from the principal after telling your mom nothing out of the ordinary had happened at school. The harder he presses against the guilt, the more the fear of it weighs him down, the knowledge that this was not okay, this was  _ not not not  _ okay and something very wrong had been done and it was his fault. Thinking about FP makes it worse. Fred slumps onto his back, stomach still churning, and his gaze lands on a foreign object lying flat on Mary’s side of the mattress - a plain, rectangular book with a green leather cover.

For the first time in twenty-seven years he had fallen asleep with this diary in his bed. 

He lets out an audible whine and thrashes away from it, bile rising in the back of his throat and threatening to spill over. His eyes screw closed, a pained, frantic sound coming from his lips as he digs his fingers into his ribs, reassuring himself with the layers of fat and muscle over the bone, the softness of time and age and here and now. It was not then. He was not there. 

He holds himself, breathing hard, and forces his eyes to open. The journal has not moved, except to turn slightly with the pull of the quilt so that the lettering on the front cover is legible in the light. Fred grabs it with one hand and lifts, meaning to throw it. The dust is so thick that it leaves two lines of grime at a right angle on the bed sheets, and he drops it in disgust. Touching the grey residue sends a wave of revulsion through him akin to touching human waste. 

As he wipes his hand desperately on the sheets he hears again the noise that had woken him - three light taps on his door, scarcely louder than the rain on the roof. His son’s voice issues from through the wood, soft with concern. 

“Dad?” 

“Come in,” Fred replies, his own voice frighteningly normal, flattening Mary’s pillow over the journal like a teenager hiding his porn magazine. He looks up to see his son hovering in the crack of the door and all at once it hits him that FP is out in the world with his secret - not just any one of his secrets but with _ that _ secret - and that he’ll most certainly be back. The feeling of having been  _ bad  _ amplifies, and his stomach sinks like lead. 

Archie’s voice is unsure. “Were-- you going to make something for dinner?” 

Fred has no idea why he or his mother had kept the diary, how it had materialized, curse-like, in his basement among egg cartons of toy soldiers and his first pair of ice skates. Surely neither of them would be that brave, that reckless with the lie. He was positive he’d left it at the facility at the end of his stay, left it to be burned or impounded, shredded to nothing. He was certain. 

“Yeah,” Fred answers quickly, despite the way his stomach rolls at the thought of eating, pushing himself up so that he can swing his legs over the edge of the bed. He’s still fully dressed, the knees of his jeans stained from kneeling on the basement floor, the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled up to his elbows. “I’m sorry I was asleep for so long,” he apologizes, because he’s kept this secret for twenty-seven years and he’s not going to drop the ball now. “I had a migraine earlier. I’m still a little out of it.” 

Fred had suffered the occasional migraine since he was a teenager, frequent enough that it floated in his medical file, but not so much that they had ever impacted his work. He could go for years without them and then have two in a week. Archie was fourteen the last time, but he nods anyway, solemn and sorry. Fred slings an arm around his son’s shoulders so he won’t frown and gives him a little shove toward the kitchen, asking him what he feels like eating.

They whip up a batch of spaghetti and meatballs. Fred sets Archie to work mixing butter with garlic salt, and takes a package of the bread rolls he’d been saving out of the freezer. There’s no time for them to thaw so he spins them in the microwave, watching the numbers count out the seconds in which FP still hasn’t been back, in which he has no idea if his secret is still his own. The queasiness comes back, clutches, goes away. 

He’s repulsed at the ease with which he lies, even the ease with which he’s able to hide the nausea swirling in his gut as they eat, the sweat dripping down his shoulder blades as he patiently puts forkful after forkful of greasy spaghetti to his lips. Chew. Swallow. Smile. 

“So, what are your plans for the evening?” he asks, twirling the pasta on his fork. Chunks of tomato slip over the white porcelain, their colour a too-vibrant, artificial red. He looks away. 

Archie has become very interested in a corner of his napkin. “Veronica invited me over to watch a movie.” 

Fred takes a bread roll from the center basket, tears it in two, and swallows some of the dry stuff in the middle. “A movie, huh? You know it’s a school night?” 

Archie nods with the solemnity of a choir boy. “Yeah, dad. I’ll be home early.”

“How early?” 

Archie pauses, Fred watches him subtract an hour, the same kind of mental math he used to do with his own father. “Ten-thirty,” his son says, all confidence. “Give or take."

“Try ten,” offers Fred in a no-nonsense voice, “and no later.” 

Archie nods, recognizing argument as futile. “Ten. Okay. I should go soon though, then, cause - uh -it’s a long movie.” 

“What movie?” asks Fred, expecting Archie to flunk the question. To his surprise, Archie has an answer ready. 

“Interview with a Vampire.” His brow furrows. “She says it’s good.” 

Fred grins and shakes his head.“Okay, have fun.” 

Archie hops up and clears his empty plate, hesitating with his hand hovering above Fred’s bread knife. “Is that all you’re eating?” Archie asks, despite the fact that Fred thinks he’s done a pretty admirable job on his plate, leaving only a clockwise smear of uneaten spaghetti on the right side. Nevertheless, he puts on a confessional smile. 

“I think so. It’s the headache.” He touches his temple. The rain runs in rivulets down the gray windows behind them. “I’ll make something later if I get hungry.” 

“That sucks.” The dishes clatter onto the countertop before Archie’s hands land briefly on the back of his shoulders and squeeze. Fred has to resist the urge to bat him off. His son pauses halfway around the table, the corners of his mouth turned down in concern.   
  
“Maybe I should stay home.” 

A swoop of panic hits him, though he manages to convey no more than a slightly furrowed brow, an apologetic shake of the head. 

“No, Arch, you go. There’s no reason for you to stay home. Unless you’re thinking about getting a head start on that history project.” 

Archie groans, picking up the butter. “You never forget anything.” 

“No,” says Fred, and if God is real he must get a good laugh out of that one. “Remember that.” 

Once Archie’s gone he does the dishes, comforting himself with the routine of it, prolonging the moment he’ll have to return to the journal. Yet the ease with which he’d lied to his son - his  _ baby  _ \- doesn’t leave his head. 

How many lies? he asks himself as he climbs the stairs again to his room. How many, tonight? How many in his lifetime? 

His parents had instructed him not to think of it as lying, and though he hadn’t seen how it could be anything else, he’d let their words bring him comfort. They, in turn, had been comforted by his obedience. 

Fred at sixteen was a good son. When he was rebellious it was only so much that he could still please. He had followed his parents’ instructions to the letter because their adult confidence and surety and love drew him like a firefly to the light. He wanted to be their good boy. Above all, he’d wanted it to be a secret as badly as they did. 

And god, he’d had such a happy adolescence other than that blip - two months in the grand scheme of things was nothing,  _ nothing, _ and the rest of the time he was sixteen and having the time of his life - the van and the girls and the drive-in, the laughter and the family vacations and the proud smiles on his parents lips. The photos from that year show him suntanned and smiling, attractive and carefree, lovely and healthy and whole and unafraid. How could two months be worth remembering thirty years later?

If only he’d gotten rid of the journal. 

And yet he shakes with anger thinking of FP’s reaction, because if FP thought he was owed those two months somehow, he was crazy. And how was Fred supposed to come clean when he didn't have access to those memories anymore, when they were buried somewhere he’d taken pains to forget about, the way you tucked money in your coat pockets in the spring? He collapses on his bed and twists his hands into fists, striking out against the mattress in pain. 

His memory had been sliced so surgically after that summer, not just by his parents but by himself, whole pieces of it removed, fake memories created - if he focuses hard he can still feel the blow of the wind, the wraparound porch he’d imagined his aunt’s house to have, the guest bedroom he’d never laid foot in. What he does remember is the Andrews family complete sitting around after his stay with the solemnity of four people who had just disposed of a corpse. His parents addressing him as an adult though he was only sixteen:  _ Fred you have to remember how important it is that we keep this to ourselves no matter how badly you might want to tell anyone, not even FP, no matter what -  _

They'd worried about Oscar, he remembers, remembers his mother lecturing his brother on the importance of staying quiet, but no one had ever worried half as much about Fred, who had insisted from the start that the whole thing be kept secret. The knowledge was too much for even him sometimes -- and then he’d wish that there had been a way, somehow, that the world could have been kind enough to allow him to keep those sixty days secret from himself. 

Pummeling the mattress with his closed fists, fingers clenched so tight they shake, he thrashes from side to side in a quiet fit of misery, throwing each and every one of the pillows off onto the floor and striking out with the heel of his foot until the slippery top sheet joins them. When he’s finished there are tears on his cheeks and his throat is raw from muffled screaming. His lower back throbs with a persistent, agonizing pain. 

Two of the secret keepers were dead, and the last had moved to the other side of the country so that it was only him now - and not Mary, not even Mary, with whom he’d shared everything in his life, the good and the bad, had known this one.

No one knew about Fred’s addiction because, for all intents and purposes, Fred had never had an addiction. Fred had simply gone away for a summer and come back the same. 

And whatever  _ had _ happened - Fred couldn’t even remember it. All there was to remember was in that book, and even that had omissions. The truth - if there was one - was not so easy to read. 

Wiping tears from his lips, Fred rolls over to face his clock. Three hours, now. Three hours that FP had been out in the world with their secret. Too late to get it back. He should have called him already, done damage control. But FP’s only evidence was sitting by his head, leather-bound and fallible, on paper that would burn if you held it to a match. 

His word against FP’s for the rest of his life? Fred considers it. Why the hell not? Wasn’t that what they had now? 

He carries the book downstairs with him and places it square in the middle of the kitchen island, stopping only to get a barbecue lighter from the garage. Bracing himself against the countertop with one hand on either side of its leather-bound face, he lets his head hang down, the peeling word - DIARY - blurring in his vision into an indecipherable streak of gold. Christ, he was tired. He’d slept, and still, he was tired. 

The joke of it all was that he didn't even remember what he'd written in the fucking thing - couldn’t for the life of him bring to mind a single line. But he knows that his heart is in there, nights of feverish scribbling, because at one time that diary was all that he had had in the world. Had known enough to be afraid when he had seen it in FP’s hand. 

What had FP read? Nights of sweating and shaking through withdrawals, surely, the pills they’d shoved at him as he was vomiting, telling him that they were the cause. The rest of the memory is an impenetrable blank, a flat white wall that reveals no light no matter how hard against it he pushes. Reading the journal might change it, it might not. But Fred doesn’t want to know. 

He drops it in the sink and clicks the lighter until it produces a blue-black flame, thinking that if he tries hard enough he can even see the vacation he had never taken, smell the pine air behind his uncle’s woodshed, and that’s all he needs to smell -- not the burning leather, not the old garlic toast, not the smell that had clung to all the boxes in his storage room, the carpet-like baby-clothes odour of home. 

He shouldn’t be thinking about this. He shouldn’t be thinking about this at all. He should burn it and get on with his life, clean the kitchen, wait up for his son, he should - 

The landline rings. 

Fred’s stomach lurches and he thinks he’s going to throw up. Evidently, FP had decided later was now.

Nauseated, trembling, he moves the diary back to the counter and crosses the room to answer the phone, carrying it back to where he had been so that he can stand by the window. The rain. It stirs something in him, a vague memory-shaped thing. Had it rained while he was there? 

“Hello?” 

“Hi, Fred.” Alice’s voice, and relief slams into him like a train. He feels winded. “Sorry to catch you so late but I saw your light on.” He hears the tap-tap-tap of her pencil on paper. “I have you down as chaperone for the next school field trip. You’re still available? It’s the thirtieth.” 

Fred lurches forward and does vomit, coughing it up into the sink, the edge of the counter cutting into his abdomen just above the bullet wound. It happens so suddenly that his first awareness of having thrown up is his forehead hitting the tap. He groans. 

“Fred?” Alice’s voice is sharp on the other end of the line. “What was that?” 

Fred holds the phone away from himself, coughing again, bringing up a mouthful not of his dinner but of something white and sticky and horrid. With effort he brings the phone back to his cheek, clunks the edge of the receiver into his head and winces. “Nothing, Alice.” His voice is hoarse and tender. “I can do the thirtieth. Keep me on the list.”

Alice’s voice is edged with suspicion. “Why’s the water running?” 

“I’m doing dishes,” says Fred, rinsing the sick down the drain. Saliva floods into his mouth and he tries not to gag, pressing the back of his hand against his lips. He closes his eyes and waits it out. One. Two. He needed to burn that diary soon, maybe in the old steel drum he kept behind the garage for lumber. Before the rain stopped. 

“Fine. I have a few more names to call.” Alice’s pencil tap-tap-taps, picking up speed, as though she’s drumming the point into the pad of paper. Fred stares at the streaming windowpane, feeling woozy and light. “Enjoy the rest of your night.” 

“Night,” he manages, and the line goes quietly dead in his ear. A fork of lightning splits the sky outside his window, very far away. For a moment Fred feels himself freeze, lost on the cusp of a memory. 

Then with quick, purposeful strides he drops the phone, seizes the journal and lighter, and lets the back door bang behind him as he steps out into the driving rain. 


	3. black and whispering as the rain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I get shivers down my spine and all I want to do is hold you tight  
> [\--Bruce Springsteen, Drive All Night](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8qpTL1wxGQ)

The rain had begun while they were cleaning, and it thumps now with rhythmic regularity against the roof of the truck, hitting in time to FP’s heartbeat, the bass of the stereo, the whisk of the wiper blades. He sails through a yellow light as he drives away from Fred’s house, his left tires bumping audibly over a pothole that sends a deluge of muddy water up over his driver’s side window. For a moment, the world outside is obscured, curtained behind a sheet of grey. Then it drains and the street refocuses. 

Nothing makes any sense. 

He’d had no idea that Fred’s addiction went that far back. None. He remembers their talk in that trailer - Fred’s face open and honest and old, the guilt in his eyes as he’d made his confession.  _ Archie found an empty bottle in the trash can. It just seemed like a wake-up call. _ No mention of the fact that it had happened before, the lengths that his family had gone to once to keep it from ever happening again. 

FP had known Fred since they were thirteen, after all. If he’d ever struggled with addiction, FP would have remembered. What kind of friend -- what kind of  _ lover  _ would he be if he’d missed the signs? 

The town. Surely he couldn’t have kept the secret this long. Not here. And then there was the other nagging question, the sulky voice that told him that if Fred had been to rehab, would he not have had a little more sympathy for what FP was going through when his own turn came? Mightn’t he have given him that last chance to put down the bottle, would he have still looked at FP in that patronizing, betrayed way, as though it was FP’s fault he had failed to turn his life around with little to no resources at his disposal? 

A horn honks a long reprimand from behind him, but he doesn’t glance in the rearview mirror to see the red he’s driven through. His eyes are fixed on the road ahead of him, blank and unseeing, his mind turning over and over as he tries to understand. Maybe he’d misunderstood. But no, there was no mistaking the words Fred had choked out in that basement. 

The weight of it begins to settle in as he swings into the high school parking lot. Fred had been to drug rehab. Age sixteen. In that fucking church-convent place that had lived, in photograph, beside his breakfast table every day for the past nine months. Attached to his son’s murder board-art project with red string - POLLY COOPER, JASON BLOSSOM. And had never told a soul. Least of all FP. 

_ You can call me.  _ That day in the trailer, when he thought they were being honest with each other again. 

_ And you can call me.  _

But he hadn’t. All summer of 1991 he hadn’t. Unless it was a joke. FP grasps the possibility with reckless faith. Any minute his cell phone would ring and it would be Fred on the other end, his voice muddied and heavy with laughter, like dew-laden grass. He would have no idea how FP could have fallen so completely for the fake diary he’d planted in that box. He would ask him to come back and look at baseball cards and forget the tasteless, stupid, awful prank that had ruined both of their afternoons. 

It made about as much sense as Fred being a drug addict at sixteen. But he’d take it. 

Fred had said they would talk about it later, but FP couldn’t wait for him to come around. At four pm his son would be in the Blue and Gold office - it was the place where Jughead always spent his after-school hours, typing up articles, leaning on deadlines, shaving off words until everything fit. FP sprints up the front steps and hurries down the hall, ignoring the curious looks from a gaggle of drama kids outside the auditorium. 

When he bangs open the door marked BLUE AND GOLD, however, he finds only one computer occupied - a blonde ponytail bent forward over the old-fashioned keyboard. Close enough.

“Betty,” FP begins, his voice oddly strangled, water audibly dripping from his clothes onto the floor. She rises from her chair as he approaches and he’s suddenly aware of how crazed he must look, how his voice is coming out heady and desperate, an alcoholic rasp to it despite the fact he hasn’t touched a bottle since he and Fred had promised to call one another. “You and Jughead, you’ve been to the Sisters, right? You’ve been investigating?” 

Betty just looks at him, eyes wide and innocent and full of question marks. “Yes.” 

“Tell me- I need you to tell me everything you know.” FP scrubs his face with both hands, momentarily pressing bright spots into his closed eyelids. “Your parents, they - they sent your sister there, right? Polly? What did you find out?” 

“Parents send their kids there when they’re trouble,” Betty replies, with the ease of a model student giving a correct answer. “Everything that makes your kid less than perfect, they take care of it. Stuff like-” 

“Drug rehab?” FP’s heart is high and tight in his throat. He’s opened his eyelids but the bright spots remain - spidery trails and golden blossoms in his vision. Betty nods. 

“Addicts, teenage mothers, the mentally ill, problem kids. Everything. Kevin says it's the only place in the state that still does conversion therapy.” 

She says it so nonchalantly that he thinks he must certainly have misheard her. 

“They-” His brain is slow, like a very old record player. The bottom seems to have fallen out of his stomach, like a plummeting elevator. “They do -” 

“You know, anti-gay camp. Cheryl was there.” 

“Cheryl - Cheryl _Blossom?_ ” FP can’t make sense of the words. The whole room seems to be blurring, the office feeling oppressively hot. His heart is fluttering like a caged bird in his ribs. “I don’t - I don’t understand. How long -” His stomach feels shaky, his throat slippery like he might be sick. “Do you know how long-?” 

Betty doesn’t seem to understand him. “She’s out now. We got her out. Mr. Jones, are you-” 

“You -” His mind soars with images, a rescue mission that could have gone wrong, his son maybe leading the way, the dark in his eyes that FP had come to associate with his own failure. “Was Jughead? You - Keller knows?” FP grabs the back of a chair to keep from tipping over. His stomach lurches and he swallows hard to keep his breakfast from coming up. “You told the police?” 

Betty is staring at him, her face unreadable. 

“Betty!” FP snaps. “You told the police?!” 

“No,” she says in a voice that’s very faint. “We didn’t tell.” 

FP shakes his head to clear it. “When were you there?” 

“We went Friday,” Betty’s voice has gone hushed and subdued, a student who hasn’t finished the big assignment and is ashamed. “To look through files. What’s going on? I can help. I want to help.” 

“You went Friday -? Both of you?” FP wants to question the sanity of the kids who are willing to sneak into a mental institution in their spare time, but now is not the time or place. He runs a hand through his hair, spraying the desk between them with water. “I need to find Jug,” he mutters. 

“He’s at the bar,” Betty replies, and FP nods, backing up in the direction he had come until his back hits the door. 

“Stay away from there!” he calls out, turning to run. “Don’t go back!” 

He runs directly into Cheryl Blossom on his way out, as though she’d been conjured by the mention of her name. “FP,” snaps the teenager, looking at him with an expression of utmost hate. “Do you always break into high schools and proposition teenage girls?” 

FP stares at her as though he’s never seen her before. “What?” he manages. 

Cheryl brandishes her cherry-red phone at him, an image of himself and Betty on the screen, BLUE AND GOLD reflected backward in the window. “Because that’s what it looks like here. And if I was on parole, I sure wouldn’t want these pictures to get out. But maybe you should have thought of that before you threw my brother in the river like a sack of garbage.” 

“Did they hurt you?” FP asks, completely ignoring her words. His mind is unspooling like thread, like the line he’s trying to follow to the end of this mystery, longer and more dreadful than he had expected. He takes a step toward her and Cheryl takes a huge step back, looking him up and down with an expression of disgust. 

“Get away from me, you ghoul.” 

“Cheryl, the Sisters-” He wants to put his hands on her arms, a comfort, but thinks she might bite them. “I - I didn’t-” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! POLICE!” Cheryl starts looking about herself, raising her voice to a holler. “SOMEONE! HELP! THERE’S A CONVICT IN THIS SCHOOL!”

No one comes, but FP doesn’t stick around to wait. He backs up at a trot, and then turns around and sprints away down the hall, the knot of his mind tangled, his heart beating somewhere hard and horrible in his mouth. 

* * *

The parking lot of the Whyte Wyrm is almost deserted, though his son’s motorbike - the one that used to be his - is parked alongside the building, helmet dangling from its handlebars. FP shoves through the front door, ignoring the curious glances and outright hostile glares from some of his old friends. It’s a coin toss, these days, as to whether he’s welcome. FP doesn’t care. 

His son is at the pool table, surrounded by a gaggle of other teenage serpents, all of them jeering and whooping as Jughead takes a shot. Fp feels a hot knot of rage burn up in the middle of him at the sight of it, the clustered bodies and leather shoulders, sweating amber in the smoky light. He wants to ask him why he’s no longer involved in his extracurriculars - why he’s traded in his schoolwork for a pool cue and the half-finished drink balanced on the scarred edge of the table. But that can wait. 

“BOY,” he bellows, parting the younger serpents like a wave, fighting annoyance at seeing how many of them have drinks in their hands. “Come here.” He steers his son by the shoulder, his huge hand on him gentle but firm. “We need to talk.” 

He walks him - marches him, really - away from the group, to a corner of the bar that had once held a pinball machine until a drunken fight between Mustang and a member of the ghoulies had totalled it for good. Now the corner houses an ominous looking orange stain and a green couch that looked like it had been wrung through a threshing machine. FP glances left and right to make sure they’re alone before leaning in close. 

“Jug, The Sisters of Quiet Mercy -” 

“I wanted to ask you about that.” Jughead stares up at him, his eyebrows pressed together, his voice low. Doesn’t bother to deny what he and Betty had been up to, or even seem surprised. “Did you know Mr. Andrews was sent there?” 

FP’s stomach drops, though it’s what he’s been waiting to hear all along. He swallows hard, but refuses to waste time. 

“When, Jughead?” 

“When he was fifteen. He had a drug problem.” His son’s eyes are fixed with eerie intensity on his reaction, and FP has the uncomfortable feeling of being catalogued, scrutinized. As though his son had decided he too was a mystery to solve. “Did you know?” 

“What did you find?” FP asks, electing to ignore the question. His hands are shaking, and it takes every effort for his voice to stay normal. Betty’s words are racketing around his head like a pinball. If Fred had -- if  _ Artie  _ had -- 

“Here.” Jughead offers his phone, and FP whisks it out of his hands, squinting down at the rectangle of light. “I didn’t tell Betty because she’d tell Archie.” FP stares, unblinking, at the image on the screen. “And call me crazy, but I don’t think Fred wants him to know.” 

He’s looking at Fred’s tenth-grade yearbook photo - Fred and his long hair, his face babyish and smooth, a big pearly grin and some long-ago joke frozen in his eyes. He looks happy and whole and small, so _ small  _ \- smaller than Archie at his age, and no bigger, surely, than Jughead, who hovers nervously in front of him, swimming in leather. FP reaches out with cold fingers and places a hand on his son’s shoulder, squeezing tight, unsure who he’s trying to comfort. 

FP remembers that shirt. He’d teased Fred about it, tugged the collar between his forefinger and thumb in the hallway on their way to class. The photo is in black-and-white, but he knows it was blue, knows it had smelled like the Andrews’ laundry detergent - comforting and clean, the odor of home. It was too small for him to have borrowed, but he might have slipped it on for a laugh, might have pillowed his face into it at the end of the day, might have wadded it up once it was off Fred’s back and tossed it for two points through the velcro basketball hoop he kept over his laundry hamper, because he was just a kid then, only a baby - 

FP had owned a copy of this photo once, wallet-size, no bigger than the little square on a driver's’ license. He’d wished he’d had a photo of his own to trade Fred for, but Forsythe Senior ordering a copy of his school picture was about as likely as hell freezing over. He doesn’t remember what had become of it. He presses two fingers into the black-and-white image of Fred’s face, trying to touch him, but only succeeds in resizing the photo so that the words are illegible. 

FP pinches the screen the way his daughter had shown him in order to move the image back to a reasonable size. The name on the document leaps out at him, printed in all caps on the first line under the title PATIENT RECORD: 

FREDRICK JOSEPH ANDREWS 

Sliding his thumb along the screen pulls the picture back into view. Fred’s emergency contact is listed as  _ Arthur Andrews _ , the phone number beneath, the one FP still knows by heart. He can hear the dial melody in his head as he scans the numbers. 

He scrolls down, his hand shaking. Two typewritten lines stand starkly out from the paper, slanted as though the paper had been fed wrong. 

**PRESCRIPTION DRUG ABUSE - ADMITTED BY PARENTS**

**60 Day Detox/Rehabilitation Program.**

He’s met enough addicts to know that withdrawal is hell - hell, he’s been an addict long enough to know that withdrawal is hell. The thought of Fred, sixteen, sent off to some facility to go through that alone, makes him sick. Still, it loosens the cold, queasy churning that’s been floating in him since Betty’s words. Pills. Rehab. At least Fred hadn’t lied - at least - 

He sinks slowly onto the couch, which slumps down under his weight, unaware of Jughead crouching by his side. Sixty days was a whole summer. Fred had been separated - institutionalized - for a whole summer, to deal with a drug problem FP didn’t even know that he had had. How could you hide something like that? Fred at sixteen was clumsy, wore his heart on his sleeve, was happy-go-lucky and funny and sweet and a dreadful liar. How could FP had never noticed him struggling? 

Never noticed him missing for sixty days? 

FP has been straining to remember July of 1991 and it’s finally come to him - that trip Fred had taken to his aunt and uncle’s farm out of the blue one summer, the one he’d sworn to FP was completely within the ordinary. FP had known him only a year by then, and hadn’t thought to question it - yet he realizes now he had never heard anything about the aunt and uncle since.

The memory is so flat and meaningless in his mind that he’s only half-certain he’s remembering it properly. But something about it nags at him - the fact that he  _ knows  _ he’d never written to his friend, because Fred had never given him an address. That Fred had called him once, in the middle of the day, and had never answered his question about where he was calling from. He figures now it was a pay phone, either inside the convent or somewhere out of it -- pictures Fred standing at a gas station beside a highway, Fred staring at a stone wall, telling him the wide open Connecticut sky looked so beautiful from his bedroom window.

His head is spinning as he thumbs through the rest of the documents, the words blurring together on the page. Fred’s allergies - one, pineapple. A vaccination record, a note about his blood pressure, blood type, the medication he’d been abusing. The list of steadily shrinking numbers that were his weigh-ins, until the number got too small for him to look at. An unpleasantly vague note scrawled across the chart of his vitals from early July -  _ withdrawl symptoms persist. _ A record of something horribly named Aversion Sessions - three in total. Allegedly successful. 

And then, finally, in red pen, across the bottom of another medical information sheet - 

Patient shows alarming homosexual inclinations. 

FP covers his mouth with his free palm. He feels Jughead shaking his shoulder, and realizes he’s moaning softly into his hand. 

There’s one last note on the page, underlined. 

Consider conversion therapy. 

“Dad.” Jughead’s shaking him, trying to get him to snap out of it. FP realizes he’s begun to hyperventilate, his breath coming in hoarse, shallow spurts. His chest feels like it’s been clutched in a vice. He shakes his head back and forth at his son’s voice, though there’s no longer room for denial. 

Twenty-seven years ago, he has to remind himself. This had all happened twenty-seven years ago, and yet it feels like today - feels like the suffering boxed out clinically in these charts and numbers is still happening, to some tortured child version of his best friend, in some small room somewhere both too far and too close to him. On the next page he finds a series of purple sheets headed THERAPY LOG. FP squints at the tight, severe handwriting, and what his eye finally lands on is enough to make him recoil as though he’s been hit. 

A short paragraph, two from the bottom.  _ In therapy, patient speaks regularly of sexual partner identified only by initials.  _

Fp’s fists are balled so tightly that they’re shaking. 

_ Patient actively practices homosexuality and has homosexual dreams. Patient shows little to no remorse for these behaviours and does not identify them as perverse.  _

Heart pounding, nails cutting into his palms, he scans the rest of the page and comes up with nothing else on the topic. He swipes the screen to make it disappear, confronted immediately with another official-looking chart, a list of bullet points concluded by SUSPECTED HOMOSEXUAL BEHAVIOUR, though no details are given. He scrolls, frantic, page after page flipping by under his thumb.  

A therapy log, July 28th - _ Patient expresses repeated desire to improve in order to be reunited with male sexual partner.  _ August 10th-  _ Treatment administered 11:02pm _ . Block caps on August 20th - 

**ADVISE TREATMENT PROCEED IMMEDIATELY.**

And then, splashed across the last page in red ink: **RELEASED.**

A scribbled signature signs off on his file closing, the date given as August 28 1991. FP stares at the last page for a long time, as though waiting for more information to arise from the screen. 

“Dad-” 

FP shakes his head. The files had brought him more questions than they had answered, but that confirmation was enough to light a fire under him, an urgent, frantic desire to act. 

“Send me these photos,” he says hoarsely, rising from the couch. The muscles in his legs protest as though he’s been sitting down for hours. 

“Dad-” 

“Later, Jug.” His hands feel as numb and as unusable as if he had dipped them in cool water. There’s a horrid taste in his mouth, like old drink. “Send me those photos.” 

There’s a harsh edge to his tone he doesn’t like - a voice that’s half his father’s, half his own. He strides out of the bar and drives home in silence, without bothering to click the radio on. The rain sheets around him, the wind whipping up until he begins to worry he’ll be blown off the road. 

The thing was, he wants to turn the truck around. Go straight to Fred and get answers. Grovel and repent, if necessary, because there’s a blooming suggestion in his head that all of this was his fault. Mostly he wants to hold him. Alive and whole and adult and sober and safe. Hold him and keep the past where it belonged. 

At home he tosses his phone on the counter and changes into dry clothes. His phone buzzes with incoming texts, but he doesn’t look at them. He never wants to see those files again. None of it. 

Unless it was Fred calling. 

Heart thudding, he snatches up his phone, but sees only Jughead’s name on the caller screen. Slamming it back down hard enough to crack it, he paces in a circle, running his hands through his hair. He wants a drink. God, he wants a drink. 

He stalls for as long as he can, cleaning the kitchen to stave off the buzzing for the alcohol, chewing his lips and nails subconsciously into rags. The trailer roof is leaking, so he places pots and pans under each of the drips, his spine set on edge by the metallic, rhythmic sound they make. 

If Fred didn’t want to talk about it then it was none of his business. If Fred didn’t want to talk about it, then he had no right to barge over there, phone in hand, and force him to spill the details of something that he definitely hadn’t wanted out into the world. If Fred had thrown him out of his house then he shouldn’t go back - not now, at least, not when Archie was home. But if - if -  

It feels like he paces for hours, losing the evening in dread and fear, a constant warring in his mind between impulse and reason. Jughead doesn’t come back, and he imagines him with Betty, both of them bent over the photos, theorizing. That or he’s still at the bar, locked in endless losing rounds of pool, doing all the mindless things FP must have done to pass the time away while Fred was - 

Was what, exactly? What had they done to him there? How badly had they hurt him? Had he - 

He’s lying on the couch on his side, half-asleep, when the pounding comes on his front door. A fork of lightning splits the sky above the trailer park and he winces. FP had never liked storms, and this was shaping up to be a big one. The wind was incredible. 

Bang-bang-bang-bang. 

“Coming,” he grunts, expecting his son to have locked himself out, half lost in a tunnel-like dream where he’s half in his trailer and half floating in shadows. He’d never bothered to turn the trailer lights on and he stumbles over a box, stubbing his toe on the coffee table and cursing phenomenally. He flicks the light switch by the entrance and throws the door open. 

It’s Fred. 

Rainwater has plastered his hair down to his head, his thin plaid shirt so drenched that the white had become a heavy gray. The green-covered diary is clasped in his hand, along with a plastic barbecue lighter and a pair of truck keys. His hand is shaking around it, the skin pale in the dark. The cover of the diary is being battered with rain. 

He’s not wearing a jacket. 

FP holds the door open, quickly, but Fred doesn’t move to enter. 

“I’m ready to talk,” he says, instead, eyes tunnel-like in the front porch glow, his face moon-white against the purple sky. 


	4. bruised arms and broken rhythm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the darkness of your room,  
> Your mother calls you by your true name,  
> You remember the faces, the places, the names,  
> You know it's never over, it's relentless as the rain  
> [\- Bruce Springsteen, Adam Raised A Cain ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0xoClNtXi0)

All semblance of reality has left him as he stumbles into the aluminum frame of FP’s trailer, the whole interior smearing and streaking before his eyes like water on glass, tipping forward and feeling himself fall, but never hitting the floor. His understanding of what had happened to him in between leaving his house and arriving here is nothing but a grey void: a senseless, rain-streaked mass of nothing through which he had travelled to fall through this door.

He comes into himself only when he’s being bundled into a second mothy quilt, hands on his shoulders forcing him down onto the sofa with a gesture that trips some long-dead memory in that part of him, that makes him fear throwing up again - something about the pressure pushing down, the weight locked hard and unforgiving on the bony ridges of his joints. FP’s voice is bleeding slowly into his ears, jagged fragments of what he finally recognizes as his name: Freddie, Freddie, over and over. 

FP’s in front of him, perhaps kneeling so that they’re the same height, his face inches from Fred’s own. Fred looks at him full in the face, looks hard and long and intent, lucid all at once, as though somehow had thrown a switch and turned him back on. He looks at the whiskers on his upper lip, the blue veins under his eyes, and then finally the eyes themselves: the dark, unchanged brown of their childhood, the whites run through with a few pink lines but otherwise pure. 

His hands are cold and wet and empty - he flexes his shaking fingers, numb, and worries about what he’s no longer holding - thinks he must have dropped it, or put it down, but his eye moves past FP to the coffee table behind him, where the diary is sitting damp and sodden, the name turned away, flanked inexplicably by a blue barbecue lighter and a familiar ring of keys. 

“I came to tell the truth,” he says, wondering why why  _ why _ FP is looking at him so frantically, why when he’s so calm, when everything is fine. 

“Freddie,” says FP again, the syllables hushed and worried, but says nothing else, and Fred takes it as a  _ go ahead _ , a signal to speak.

“I-” he begins, “I -I, um-” And he knows what comes next, I had a pill addiction or I went to rehab, when I was sixteen - or maybe he should have started with that, when I was sixteen I got hurt I started popping pills, only he just keeps repeating that one stupid pronoun, his mind a blank behind, “I-I-” and then he’s pulling at the collar of his shirt, fingers still wet and numb “I- I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe-” he stutters, his breath trapped and shuddering under the solid vice of his ribs, the forbiddenness of the secret breaking down on him like a particularly violent wave. 

The world is going grey again, or at least flashing white around the edges, bright and hazy. Thumbprints at the crook of his arm jar him back into reality - FP’s holding his arms saying  _ breathe in, breathe out _ , coaching him through a panic attack the way he used to do for him, when his father’s violence got particularly bad. At first he feels it will surely be futile, that he’ll suffocate and die, but then there’s air in his lungs and his head is swimming and he’s breathing again. When he’s pulling in breath the weight of it all hits him and he starts to sob, and then FP’s arms are around him and he’s being pulled into his chest, the flat plane of his dirty T-shirt. “Don’t talk,” FP’s murmuring, “Don’t talk, it’s okay,” and the heavy warmth of his hug is like a shelter all around him, a place to disappear. 

He pulls back from his friend, the image of him blurry through his tears, and tries to speak regardless, “I- I - The Sisters-” 

“I’ll talk,” says FP worriedly, smoothing his hair back like they’re father and son, his touch more gentle than anyone else would have believed. “I’ll talk and you nod yes or no, okay?” He pulls him in tighter, rocks him a little, one hand nestled at the back of his neck, enough to make Fred feel even more the child. FP’s breathing is soft and even, and being pressed against the gentle swell and fall of his breath is enough to slow his fluttering heart, relax some of the tension from his shoulders, even though thunder still rumbles outside.

“Okay,” says Fred shakily, and FP releases him, sits back a little and Fred realizes FP’s sitting on the coffee table, the diary only inches from his fingertips. Fred jerks his eyeline away from it and prays that it will disappear. 

“You went to rehab,” says FP, dark chocolate eyes locked on his. 

He had been prepared to admit it, but he still pauses, the thing too awful to bring forward and make real. Fred had never struggled with keeping his silence, suspecting in part for all these years that punishment and shame were what addiction was all about, that everything that had happened to him had been due course, at the very least deserved. He closes his eyes when he nods, the last of the shame still in him. 

“For a drug problem,” FP says.  

Fred nods again. He has one hand wrapped in the soaked front of his flannel shirt, under the blankets, clenched so tight that it trembles. 

“It was in high school.”

“I got hurt,” he manages finally, voice hoarse like he’s been yelling. “In basketball. Sophomore year. You remember.” 

A flash of that memory, so different from the others - heat and sweat and loudness, the gold and blue gymnasium, the red-hot pain and what felt like a million shards of glass in his knee, his leg bent wrong, himself screaming in grief, the stretcher under him. Fifteen-year-old FP, floppy-haired and sweaty and gangly in his uniform, promising him in the hospital that his shot had gone in. Fred had never discovered if that had been a lie or not. 

FP, the real, adult FP, speaks beside him. “And they gave you pills?” 

Fred nods. 

“And we never noticed?” 

Fred knows who  _ we _ refers to - FP, Alice, Hermione, Mary. The group of friends that had been his mainstay throughout his four years at school, who had crowded beside his locker every morning with hellos, had decorated the blue aluminum with get well cards when he’d busted his knee. 

“I was good at hiding it. Dad found the pills in my bag near the end of the school year.” 

FP sucks in a long breath. “Artie sent you-” 

“No. Dad was against it. But he wanted something no one would catch on about, so he let me go. Wanted it to be a secret. But it was my choice. I told them I wanted to go to rehab.” He covers his face. “I just wanted it over with.” 

FP had moved to the couch somehow, one arm around him, one thumb stroking his back. “Let me get you some water.” 

“No.” He wants it, wants to ask for a toothbrush too, or some gum - teenage FP would have had a million blister packs on his person, always ready for a tonsil hockey tournament - but worries that he might still vomit again. “I want to talk. Let me talk.” 

“Okay.” That thumb, heavy circles between his shoulder blades. FP’s voice is unsure, his face oddly swollen, like he’s near tears. The pressure on his back is laden with fear. Fred steadies himself with a breath and goes on. 

“I went to them and said I wanted to go somewhere. The summer was coming up and I thought no one would have to know. The Sisters was the cheapest option.” 

“And they just sent you?” The thumb presses deeper into his back - it would be a hell of a nice massage, if the circumstances were different. “That place is a hellhole.” 

“I begged.” Fred’s voice shudders and he straightens his back, pulls his shoulders back from his ears. “I told them it would be okay. We made a pact, all four of us. Not to tell anyone.” 

“But why was it so important?” 

“It was shameful. I was out of control.” He looks at FP, aware for the first time of how wet he is, the rainwater dripping down his back from his hair. “You never understood, but I knew you suspected. There were days I came to school so angry. Or I wouldn’t be acting like myself and you had questions. But I lied.” Fred closes his eyes, and the world seems to spin momentarily in the dark, enough that he feels nauseated and disoriented when he opens them again. His voice is hushed, raw. “I lied every time.” 

“You’re shaking,” says FP, and Fred feels it for the first time - the tremors running from his too-tight jaw down into his hands, his knees. It had been effort to get the secret out, to pry it from the place inside him that it had lived, but now that it’s gone he feels a monumental relief. “Let me make you some tea. Coffee. Hot cocoa. Anything.” 

“No.” 

He’s addicted now to confession. He speaks with the same frantic haste as he had once written in the green-covered journal, his voice raw and different from his own, like someone possessed and speaking in tongues. The confession feels good now, a reward, a pat on the back. It runs out of him like blood. 

“I thought I had it under control, but I didn’t. I forged my own prescription. So many times. It was all I thought about. I had withdrawals if I didn’t take them to school. I felt like I was unstoppable. Nothing hurt anymore. I was so good - basketball. Baseball. I won that stupid award.” 

Another gold-and-blue high school memory, this one less potent with the absence of a shattered knee. The sports banquet, himself the youngest of the winners, their cafeteria draped with streamers and crowded with folding chairs, the heftiness of the metal trophy they’d put in his hands, his father and mother in the front row, their applause and their smiles and their camera. His photo probably still in the display case for it, gathering dust. He couldn’t remember the title, but it had been something dreadfully important. An extra point toward his athletic letter. 

“You deserved that.” 

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ll never know.” 

“You did.” His voice, so sure that Fred doesn’t bother to question it. He leans against the arm that circles his shoulders, defeated and tired and still shivering, hoping that FP will accept what he’s given him as enough. But FP picks it up again, playing the game. 

“You were there sixty days.” 

“Yes.” 

“And then you just came home?” 

“There was a week left of the summer. I told you all that I was working on my aunt’s farm.” It slips off the tongue so easily. Still more truth than the truth, after all this time. Those entries in that journal may as well have been penned by a fiction writer, excerpts from someone else’s life.

FP abandons his yes or no questions. “What was it like?” 

“It got easier. My parents didn’t want to talk about it. You guys didn’t know about it. I convinced myself it was like it never happened.” 

A long pause, FP’s breath on the crown of his head. Then: 

“What was rehab like?” 

Fred might have laughed if he had had any strength in his body left to laugh, because the question was unanswerable. The repression of the memory was too huge, too final, too complete. Even in the moment, he had felt certain parts of his mind closing down, sparing him from the trauma he was going through: the slow erosion of the present that had now become his past. Those two months are a solid white wall, an empty room, a child’s approximation of hell. There had been hellfire, and beyond the hellfire, nothing. 

For the longest time, he had not allowed himself to admit that there had been anything at all. That he had done anything that summer other than mow hay and hammer beams. Now, as he tries to re-open it the way he’ll later crack the water-damaged spine of the sodden diary, he finds a blankness soft as dough, one he could push his hands into and unbury, if he tried. He doesn’t try. 

“Cold turkey,” Fred begins slowly, thinking maybe that was all FP had been asking. “I threw up for two weeks straight. Couldn’t stop sweating. They’d say: the pills make you sick like this. If you never take them again, you never have to be sick like this again. That was how they tried to fix you.”

“And you never thought maybe that the nuns in this boarded up convent weren’t carrying any kind of medical degree?” 

The sarcasm in his voice is so cold that it makes heat flare up in Fred’s gut, his hands curling into tight fists as anger hits him like a slap. “I was stupid, FP, I was just a kid!” His vision goes blurry as tears well up in his eyes again. It hits him all at once that this is not just a story but his life, was real, was part of his history, acknowledged now, and the tears in his voice spill over onto his cheeks, his body shaking harder than ever. FP hugs him, fast and tight, rocking him a little, the apology unspoken. 

“You were all alone,” FP says, his voice brittle and pained, as though he had only just realized this. 

Fred nods. “They let you keep photos of your family,” he blurts out suddenly. I had one of my parents and one of you. I must have looked at it a hundred times. I wrote about you in there-” And he nods to the journal at last, the green thing that’s sat drying on FP’s coffee table through his whole confession, though he knows FP’s read it. “They gave us journals because we were supposed to write in them about how we fucked up and read them at group time. I had to hide that one because I didn’t think they’d like what I was writing.” 

Maybe he’s imagining it, but FP goes tense, spine stiffening under Fred’s hands, like a string has been yanked taut in his back. Fred tries to soften the blow, though he imagines it’s beyond softening. “My parents came to visit a bunch of times. They brought me birthday presents.” His heart sinks, a bad taste in his mouth. “I turned sixteen in there.” 

FP’s thumb caresses the back of his neck, picking up its massage again. His voice is carefully neutral, as if rehearsed. 

“What else did they do in there?” 

Fred wants to rub his eye - there’s a tear gathering in his eyelash - but FP has both his hands pinned. “Other than that, they had a schedule for us. We got activity time. Quiet time. Counsellor sessions. Movie night. There was church, but you didn’t have to go. I liked free hour the best, because you got to go outside in the garden. We had to shower with cold water and they would -- they’d make us stand in the stalls and kind of hose us down and I was so cold. I was always so cold.” 

The thumb pauses on his back at last, and he manages to free one hand from being crushed between FP and himself. He wipes a tear. 

“And the conversion therapy?” FP asks, very softly. 

Fred swallows what feels like a rock lodged in his throat. “The what?” 

FP keeps looking at him, waiting for what he seems to have deemed an appropriate reaction. The corners of his mouth turn down when he doesn’t get one. “Fred--” and his voice is almost inordinately gentle, like he was talking to a very sick child. Fred’s heart begins to beat too fast. 

“What are you talking about, FP?” 

“It’s in your file, Freddie.” The expression on FP’s face is familiar - it’s the one from right after Artie had died, when he was always waiting for Fred to break down or explode. His voice is grave. “Fuck, Freddie, I’m not naive. I know gay kids don’t last long in small towns. Hell, look at the way we grew up. But this…”

“What are you talking about?” Fred asks again, his voice going up at least an octave. “You don’t mean - you don’t think - my file? What are you talking about, my file?” 

FP reaches for the coffee table, toward the green-covered diary, and Fred almost stops him before he realizes FP is reaching for his phone. He holds it, but doesn’t unlock the screen. His body is turned toward Fred. 

“They still do it, there, Freddie.” FP’s eyes are serious. “I talked to the kids. The Sisters of Quiet Mercy is still running. They have a gay conversion camp in their basement, and it’s been running at least since the nineties. And your file says you were in for it.” 

Fred stares at him, without understanding. He feels cold, carved from ice. 

“I don’t understand you.” 

“Here-” and FP offers him the phone with both hands, like he’s holding out a talisman. “It’s unlocked.” 

Fred takes it from his hands. The photo on the screen is his own face, fifteen years old and goofily happy. He’d never remember what the photographer must have said to him on school picture day to make him smile like that. 

His stomach clenches up. “I don’t want it.” 

“Just look.” 

It takes him two tries to figure out how to flip through. He pushes the images around with his thumb until he comes to the underlined phrase that must have given FP pause: 

_ Suspected homosexual behaviour.  _

_ Consider Conversion Therapy.  _

“This doesn’t mean anything.” He’s trembling all over, horribly, his past suddenly so close to him - numbers and lines and vocabulary on yellow forms, all of it the likes of which he hasn’t seen in years. Had never really known this file existed. “So they knew about us, so what, they probably read my diary. It says  _ consider _ , that doesn’t mean-” 

“It says therapy log.” FP’s huge thumb swipes the screen for him, changes it to the purple headed stationery. “They did some kind of therapy.” 

“It was talk therapy. You sat in a chair and talked about your feelings.” 

FP doesn’t let up. “What are aversion sessions?” 

“It was this thing they did with the pills.” Memory is coming to him in slices, white-hot and horribly sharp. “They gave you something to make you throw up and they gave you the pills right before so you wouldn’t want to take them any more. That’s all.” 

“And what kind of movies did they make you watch?” 

“I don’t know! I don’t remember! But I didn’t - I would remember if-” 

FP is watching him very nervously, again, the look he’d had after Artie died. Afraid and sorry. Fred wants to smack it off of his face, but he’s too afraid to move. There were too many unknowns. Too many white walls. And if he was wrong, and if FP was right- 

Only clearly it hadn’t worked, because he was sitting here as an adult, and he loved men as much as he ever had. Was that proof enough, or had he only got out in time? Fred covers his face and dips his hands into the memory. Peels back everything he dares touch, seeking out the horror of those words. His confidence grows as he shifts through images. He knows.  _ Knows  _ he’s not wrong. Knows he’d been spared. 

“It didn’t happen to me, I promise. I promise I would remember.” 

FP wets his lips, nods. “But it’s happening now. Betty said Cheryl-” There’s no recognition in Fred’s eyes, so he scrambles to finish the sentence. “Cheryl Blossom was sent there. This year.” 

This year. It hits him like a ton of bricks. He had spent so much time separating himself from the Sisters of Quiet Mercy that he had forgotten that the place had gone on without him, had remained open long after he had exiled himself from its stone passageways, long after his parents had yanked him back into the land of the living, the happy, the clean. 

He had buried it in his own past, but it must have remained as it was for all of this time, all those yellow files and cold showers and whirring projectors on movie night. His heart skips a beat and his stomach turns over. Fred has his face covered with his hands. “Oh, God,” he whispers. His body is shaking. “Oh, God.” 

“Fred?” FP’s hand on his shoulder, and again the gesture sets off a revulsion in him, a dread that feels much closer to the surface of his memory than before. Someone at that place had shoved him down by the shoulders - he remembers only details: the metal frame of a bedpost, the smell of vomit and a wooden crucifix that had hung, terrifyingly, over his bed so that he wondered sometimes if it would come loose in the night and come crashing down on his head - he had decided that such an act, if it ever came, must be a divine intervention. 

A thousand other memories come flooding in to join this one, as though they had been waiting for the opportunity. The stack of books at activity time, the smell of crayons, the Addiction Workbook and the colouring pages and the DIARY-

He snatches it wildly off the coffee table and flips through it, terrified for a moment that the pages will be illegible, but the water damage is only around the edges and the black ink remains clear. By some sick joke of the universe it falls open to his birthday -  **_happy birthday to me_ ** , reads the entry, bleak and painful,  **_i don’t know how much my parents are paying for this, but-_ **

He had slept with this diary in his bed, scrawled in it every night and every day, his only release and escape except for the one blessed hour he got to go jogging, got to walk through the garden and breathe. The rusted, dripping shower heads, the smell of antiseptic and guilt that choked the place, the cold in the stones, in his body, the rain, the one diary entry dated August 15th, the words hopeless under his fingers -- 

Make me pure make me pure make me pure make me pure make me pure make me pure make me pure make me pure make me pure make me pure make me pure make me pure

\---and so on and on, words running all over the page like marching ants. 

“There was a boy.” His tears are falling like the rain outside, and FP’s suddenly cradling his face, worry and hurt in the rough pads of his fingers where they smear the tear tracks away. The memory is jarringly real in his head, vibrant with colour. The flowers along the path. The other boy he always passed on his jogs, enough that he had begun to recognize him as part of his routine, distractingly beautiful, more statue than teenager. 

Fred was sickly thin after weeks of throwing up, his suntan all but gone, and he had thought at first he envied the flash of the other boy’s back muscles before he had realized, in some small instinctive part of himself that he desired them. His voice waves now and he chokes: 

“There were others, it wasn’t just addicts, there were lots of kids there, and you’re right, some of them must have been-” 

The muscles in the other boy’s back, the eternal blue of his eyes, the deceptively low lilt of his voice the one time they had spoken (nice legs, he had said, do you run often?) and his crush had seemed delightfully mischevious to him at the time, fun and special and his own and yet Fred had swaggered arrogantly out of the place once his time was up, but there was a day the boy had been gone from the path and he had never seen him again - 

“I didn’t know,” he breathes, his chest tight. “I didn’t notice.” 

“Freddie, listen.” The rain seems louder now, almost painful. FP’s hands are on his, on the diary, trying to pry it from his grip,  **_make me pure_ ** scribbled in sweaty ribbons under his palms. But Fred interrupts him. 

“I could have said something. If I had said something, maybe they would have stopped it. But I  _ didn’t _ .” He stares into FP’s eyes, trying to will him to understand the gravity of his mistake. “I didn’t say anything.” 

“Fred. Look at me.” 

Fred stares at the clock. It’s ten o'clock. Past the time he’d told himself he had to get home. FP’s hands are on his arms, grounding him. 

“This isn’t going to go on, all right? We’re going to stop it. We’re going to stop it. We’re going to shut that place down.” 

The rain, the rain, the rain- 

“But I need you to breathe. You’ve been through a lot, and I’m so sorry. I should have noticed. But I’m here now and we’re going to stop it, I promise.” FP’s voice wavers. “Fred, breathe.” 

“God-” says Fred thickly and then he remembers: that it was in prayer they’d forced him to his knees beside his bed, that the force of hands on both shoulders had been accompanied by a command - “pray” - pray, as though only divinity could save him, as if they had suspected there was more than oxycodone in his system, something harder to get out. The memory is like a slap. His cheeks burn. 

His mouth tastes filthy. He rises from the couch and stumbles to the tiny trailer bathroom, grabbing FP’s toothbrush out of the holder without asking permission. He empties a glob of toothpaste onto it and scrubs his mouth until he tastes copper. 

“Fred-” 

Fred spits in the sink just as a branch of lightning forks the sky - the thunder lands soon after it, and the whole trailer seems to shake. His vision is going blurry again, his breath hitching in his throat. The next thing he knows he’s collapsed against FP’s front, his face buried in his chest, FP’s arms the only thing holding him up as his body shakes with sobbing. 

He thinks FP’s crying too - his chest is hitching in a way that’s too rhythmic to be anything else. The next thing he knows they’re in the kitchen and the microwave is beeping and FP’s putting something warm in his hands - milk, he thinks, saying drink it, just drink it, it’s okay, and Fred does. 

He doesn’t ask what’s in it, though FP wouldn’t resort to drugging him - that’s Alice’s game. He swallows two mouthfuls of the hot liquid without tasting it and spills the rest on the trailer floor and FP says  _ that’s okay, that’s okay, shh, I’ve got you _ , and that’s how Fred knows he must really be a wreck because FP’s never this gentle. 

He thinks of the very end of his summer, after he’d been cleared to leave. He had spent one sleepless night on his aunts couch, feeling pure, not in a new body but a body that was built to approximate his old one (he’d done millions of pushups to gain back the weight he’d lost, had gorged himself on disgusting rehab food), the familiarity of school the next week, a day he'd once dreaded. The excitement in him at the thought of his old life, the relief that his sins had not been beyond fixing. The thought that it was over. 

He holds himself up now, anchors himself to FP’s heartbeat, FP’s tentative hands around his back, warm and solid and gentle, and thinks  _ dear God let it finally be over.  _


End file.
